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Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver
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<H1 ALIGN=CENTER> Amanda </H1> <BR>
<H2 ALIGN=CENTER>
The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver <BR>
Copyright (c) 1991, 1995 University of Maryland at College Park <BR>
All Rights Reserved.  <BR>
</H2>

See the file <!WA0><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/amanda/COPYRIGHT.html">COPYRIGHT</a> for distribution
conditions and official warranty disclaimer.
Amanda was written by <!WA1><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/~jds/">James da Silva</a>.

<H2>
Amanda 2.3.0 ALPHA RELEASE NOTES - May 19, 1996
</H2>

The latest version of Amanda is always available via anonymous ftp
from <!WA2><a href="ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/amanda/">ftp.cs.umd.edu:/pub/amanda</a>.
<P>

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE ``AS-IS''. UMD is making
this work available so that other people can use it.  This software is in
production use at our home site - the UMCP Department of Computer Science -
but we make no warranties that it will work for you.  Amanda development is
unfunded - the author maintains the code in his spare time.  As a result,
there is no support available other than users helping each other on the
amanda-users mailing list.  See below for information on the mailing lists.


<H2>
WHAT'S NEW SINCE 2.2.6?
</H2>

<UL>
<LI> A number of material bugs fixed, including fixes incorporated into John
  Stoffel's WPI patches to amanda, which he called 2.2.6.5.
<LI> Backup files larger than 2 GB now supported.  The current limit is 2^31
  Kbytes (2 terabytes), which should hold us for a few more years (1/2 :-).
<LI> Support for GNUTAR-based backups.
<LI> Support for writing to multiple tapes (sequentially) in one run.
<LI> Support for multiple backups in parallel from the same client host.
<LI> Records from the curinfo database can be exported and imported to/from a
  textual format.  This allows fixing a corrupted database by running the
  text version through a script and reimporting it.  Individual records or
  the entire database can be exported/imported.
</UL>

More details for these new features can be found in docs/WHATS.NEW.


<H2>
WHAT'S LEFT TO DO FOR AMANDA 2.3?
</H2>

<UL>
<LI> Release engineering and porting on many platforms.
<LI> Update and extend the documentation.
<LI> Archival dumps via "skip-incr" are not doing the right thing.
<LI> Pick many little nits.
<LI> Probably lots of other things.
</UL>


<H2>
WHAT'S NEW SINCE 2.2.5?
</H2>

<UL>
<LI> A number of material bugs fixed.
<LI> A lot of lint picked in the whole package.
<LI> The documentation is now reasonably up to date.
<LI> This version has been locally compiled and at least the client side tested
  on the following systems:
	SunOS 4.1.3	IRIX 5.2 <BR>
	Solaris 2.3	BSDI BSD/386 1.1 <BR>
	Ultrix 4.2	NetBSD 1.0 <BR>
	DEC OSF/1 2.0	AIX 3.2 <BR>
  I don't have any HP/UX machines locally to try it on, but I've tracked
  patches submitted by Neal Becker &lt;neal@ctd.comset.com&gt;, so I'm reasonably
  confident that 2.2.6 shouldn't be far from the mark on that platform.
</UL>


<H2>
WHAT'S NEW SINCE 2.1?
</H2>

Many things have changed since Amanda 2.1.  Here are the major items:

<UL>
<LI> SYSV shared memory no longer required on server side if mmap is available.
<LI> Supports GZIP compression.
<LI> Supports use of mount names as well as device names in disk list
  (eg "/usr" instead of "sd0g").
<LI> Amanda now thinks in real-time - you may run it several times a day if 
  you wish, and it won't get confused.
<LI> Supports Kerberos 4 security as well as BSD-style .rhosts, including
  encrypting files over the net.  The Kerberos support is available as a
  separate add-on package - see the file KERBEROS.HOW-TO-GET on the ftp
  site.
<LI> Improved network protocol - faster startup, no longer dump specific,
  hooks in place for non-dump clients.
<LI> Client-side checks in amcheck - can check sanity of all client hosts very
  quickly.
<LI> Supports multiple holding disks, and load balances between them.
</UL>

More details are available in docs/WHATS.NEW.


<H2>
WHAT IS AMANDA?
</H2>

This is an alpha-test release of Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic
Network Disk Archiver.  Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many
computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive.  This release
is currently in daily use at the University of Maryland at College Park
Computer Science Department, backing up all the disks on all the
workstations in the department: currently over 70 gigabytes of data across
more than 400 filesystems on more than 146 workstations and servers, using
a single 5 Gigabyte Exabyte EXB-8500.  Here are some features of Amanda:

<UL>
  <LI> written in C, freely distributable.
  <LI> built on top of standard backup software: BSD Unix dump/restore, and
    later GNU Tar and others.
  <LI> will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting
    finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to
    tape.  For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
    with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours. 
  <LI> does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
  <LI> supports tape changers via a generic interface.  Easily customizable to
    any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via
    the unix command line.
  <LI> supports Kerberos 4 security, including encrypted dumps.  The Kerberos
    support is available as a separate add-on package, see the file
    KERBEROS.HOW-TO-GET on the ftp site, and the file docs/KERBEROS in this
    package, for more details.
  <LI> for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
    backup image on the tape for you.
  <LI> recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
  <LI> reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators.
  <LI> will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no
    more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
  <LI> includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both
    the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will
    send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to
    fail.
  <LI> can compress dumps before sending over net, with either compress or gzip.
  <LI> can optionally syncronize with external backups, for those large
    timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system
    is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active
    filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
  <LI> lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
</UL>


<H2>
WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
</H2>

Amanda requires a host that is mostly idle at night, with a large capacity
tape drive (e.g. an EXABYTE or DAT tape).  This becomes the "tape server
host".  All the computers you are going to dump are the "backup client
hosts".  The server host can also be a client host.

Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partition on the
server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to tape.
The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to the disk, only
writing them to tape when the backup is finished.  Note that the holding
disk is not required: without it Amanda will run backups sequentially to
the tape drive.  Running it this way kills the great performance, but still
allows you to take advantage of Amanda's other features.

As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be larger
than the dump output from your largest disk partitions.  For example, if
you are backing up some full gigabyte disks that compress down to 500 MB,
then you'll want 500 MB on your holding disk.  On the other hand, if those
gigabyte drives are partitioned into 500 MB filesystems, they'll probably
compress down to 250 MB and you'll only need that much on your holding
disk.  Amanda will perform better with larger holding disks.  We use 800 MB
for our holding disk.

Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are larger
than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to tape one at
a time.  If you have many such dumps you will be limited by the dump speed
of those machines.


<H2>
WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
</H2>

Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump, has sockets
and inetd, and either system V shared memory, or BSD mmap implemented.

In particular, Amanda 2.3.0 has been compiled, and the client side tested
on the following systems:
	SunOS 4.1.3	IRIX 5.2
	SunOS 5.5	BSDI BSD/OS 2.1
	Ultrix 4.2	NetBSD 1.0
	DEC OSF/1 3.2	AIX 3.2
We only run the server side under SunOS 4.1.3, but it compiles on all those
platforms, and I have no reason at this time to beleive it will not work.

In addition, I have tracked patches for the following systems that we don't
run in house:
	FreeBSD
	Linux
	HP/UX
	NextStep


<H2>
HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
</H2>

    docs/INSTALL	contains general installation instructions.
    docs/SYSTEM.NOTES	contains system-specific information.
    docs/KERBEROS	explains installation under Kerberos 4.
    docs/TAPE.CHANGERS	explains how to customize the changer interface.
    docs/WHATS.NEW	details new features.


<H2>
WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
</H2>

Amanda is completely unsupported and made available as-is.  Unfortunately,
I just don't have the time to answer all user questions and help all new
sites get started.
<P>
I do maintain the following mailing lists for those interested in Amanda:
<P>
==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list.  Send
    mail to &lt;listname&gt;-request@cs.umd.edu, or with the following line
    in the body of the message:
	subscribe &lt;your-email-address&gt;
<P>
    where listname is the following:

<DL>
<DT>
    amanda-announce
<DD>
        The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements
        related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new
        versions, contributions, and fixes.  NOTE: the amanda-users list is
        itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
        subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
	To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@cs.umd.edu.

<DT>
    amanda-users
<DD>
        The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
        about the Amanda Network Backup Manager.  This package and related
        files are available via anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.umd.edu in the
        pub/amanda directory.  NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the
        amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of
        the two lists, not both.
	To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@cs.umd.edu.

<DT>
    amanda-hackers
<DD>
        The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the
        technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,
        ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.
	To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@cs.umd.edu.
</DL>

<H2>
IS THERE AN ARCHIVE OF THE AMANDA MAILING LISTS?
</H2>

There is a www archive of each of the amanda mailing lists:
<li>
<!WA3><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/amanda/amanda-announce">amanda-announce</a>
<li>
<!WA4><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/amanda/amanda-users">amanda-users</a>
<li>
<!WA5><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/amanda/amanda-hackers">amanda-hackres</a>
<P>

That's It.
<HR>
<I>Last updated on Tue Nov 12 19:05:56 EST 1996</I>
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